Authors: Brandon Massey

Twisted Tales (10 page)

BOOK: Twisted Tales

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Raheim turned. His face was full of surprise.

“What are you doing in here, Scottie? Go back in the living room.”

“No.” I stood my ground. “Leave her alone.”

Raheim’s eyes sharpened like daggers.

“I’m warning you, turn around and leave,” he said, in a low, dangerous tone that I recognized from the brotherly beatings he’d given me over the years. “This ain’t none of your business.”

Physically, I was no match for Raheim. He was at least three inches taller than me and outweighed me by over sixty pounds—and every ounce in his favor was muscle. He could bench-press four hundred and fifty pounds with the ease of a hydraulic press. I struggled to do twenty push-ups.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t back down. Elana needed me. And I needed her.

“If you’ve got your hands on her, then this
is
my business,” I said.

I hadn’t anticipated the punch. Raheim swung at me so fast that one moment, I was looking at him grope Elana, the next, his fist was crashing into my jaw.

I fell backward and collided with the refrigerator like a drunk. Its magnets clattered to the tile floor. Dazed, I slid to the floor on wobbly knees.

Raheim seized the front of my shirt. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You know better than to challenge me!”

I tried to loosen Raheim’s hold on me, but his hands were like steel clamps. He hauled me to my feet and pinned me against the wall. His breath was hot, his nostrils flared. The last time I’d seen him this angry with me, he had broken my arm (our parents believed me when I told them I’d fallen off my bicycle).

On the other side of the kitchen, Elana hugged herself. “Johnny!” she cried. “Now!”

Even in the maelstrom of my fear, I had the clarity of mind to wonder why she was summoning her strange son.

I received the answer to my question a moment later, when I saw Johnny on the threshold of the kitchen.

Dressed in his pajamas, the kid might have appeared harmless in any other situation. But anger—or hunger—had transformed him into a fearsome spectacle. His dark eyes burned like coals. His hands flexed, his long nails curved, like claws.

His mouth bristled with sharp teeth. Like fangs.

Distracted by my terror, Raheim let me go and whirled to face the boy.

“What the fuck ... ?” Raheim started.

Johnny’s swift attack cut off the rest of Raheim’s sentence.

The boy leapt across the kitchen like a jumping spider. He hooked his arms and legs around Raheim’s torso and plunged his teeth into Raheim’s neck. Raheim screamed as blood spurted, spraying the child’s face. Johnny devoured the blood, sucking. Raheim attempted to throw him off, tried to pry the boy away from him, but Johnny tightened his hold on him. And still he continued to suck.

His eyes rolling up to expose the whites, Raheim sagged to the floor.

I was sickened by what I was seeing. I could have done something, saved my brother.

Instead, I ran.

I dashed out of the kitchen and bolted out of the house. Elana called after me, but I didn’t stop. I ran to the Tahoe—and was at the door when I realized that I didn’t have the keys. Raheim had them. I’d have to go back in the house to get them.

The prospect of going back in there to face that bloodsucking child was about as appealing as crawling through a snake pit.

I would have to travel by foot. Maybe some kind soul would give me a lift, just as we’d helped Elana and her demon-boy.

A revelation flitted at the edge of my thoughts.

What if Elana had planned to bring us to her home? What if she’d intended, from the beginning, to feed us to her son?

A gorgeous woman like her was sure to catch a man’s attention. No red-blooded man would be willing to leave her stranded in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a tow truck when she lived only a few miles away. Any man would do as we had done: give her a ride home.

Having her son along would elicit even more sympathy.

As the truth settled over me, I decided that I had to get as far away as possible from this house. I started running across the driveway, toward the road.

“Scottie, wait!”

It was Elana. She rushed out of the house.

Every logical molecule in my body urged me to keep running. But my blind, crazy love for her brought me to a halt.

She ran to me.

“I’m so sorry you had to see that,” she said. “Even after all these years, I haven’t gotten used to watching Johnny feed.”

“You set us up!” I said. “You planned all this! You were going to feed both of us to that monster kid!”

“No.” Elana took my hand in hers. She kissed my fingers, and in spite of my confusion and terror, I got a warm, tingly sensation. “Not you. You’re special to me, Scottie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked.

My heart thundered in my chest.

“I do,” she said. “I think you do, too. I felt it when I first touched your hand.”

She loved me, too. Just as I’d yearned to believe.

But years of rejection resisted the evidence in her eyes, in her touch, in her voice.

“You mean it?” I asked.

She stepped forward and kissed me. On the lips. Only in my wettest dreams had I ever been kissed like that. She tasted my tongue, twined her hands around my waist, and pulled me closer to her, rubbing against the bulge that had appeared at the front of my pants.

“I mean it,” she said. “I want you to stay with us.”

“You do?”

“I’ve been praying for a man like you.” She ran her hands along my arms. “Johnny ... he wants a father.”

I saw, over her shoulder, her son step onto the porch. Blood stained the front of his pajama top. He watched us, silently.

“What is he?” I asked.

“He’s my son.”

“But the blood-drinking ... the teeth ...”

“It’s his condition,” she said. “He was born that way. He hates it. He hates everything about himself, Scottie. That’s why I don’t keep pictures of him around the house—I used to do that, but he’d smash the frames. His self-esteem is so low ... because everyone is scared of him.”

Johnny’s head hung low. He shuffled back inside the house.

Although Johnny was monstrous, I empathized with him. I knew how it felt to despise yourself.

“But you’re killing people to feed him,” I said.

“Only men who deserve it,” she said, with steel in her voice. “Only bad men, like your brother.”

Someone else might have come to my brother’s defense. I couldn’t. She was speaking the truth.

“Come back inside, Scottie,” she said. “Johnny needs you.
I
need you.”

A woman had never needed me. Ever. And this glorious woman was telling me that she needed me, and I knew she meant it.

“Okay,” I said.

We went back inside the house together.

At night, I hid in the shrubbery on the side of the road.

Dressed to kill, Elana popped the hood of the Chevy Tahoe that had once belonged to my brother. She made a show of looking underneath the hood, and then leaned against the side of the SUV, as if distraught.

Within minutes, a young man in a pickup truck pulled over. He got out of the truck and strutted to her, cocky and flirtatious.

Gripping a stun gun, I watched my wife—yes, we had married—interact with the guy, waiting for her signal that he was the one for the night. She wore a smile as she spoke to the stranger, but I knew that her smile was meant for me. We had a special relationship, a family that others might have deemed weird, and even repulsive—but I didn’t care about that. It was
ours
.

It felt so good to be wanted, needed.

It felt so good to be loved.

Predators

Olivia Strong had been living in the neighborhood for three weeks when she became aware that the man was watching her.

Olivia was renting a three-bedroom, two-story contemporary house in Fairburn, a southwest suburb of Atlanta. It was located in one of those cookie-cutter subdivisions that had popped up all over metro Atlanta in recent years: a playground, swimming pool, and man-made lake were among the amenities, but the community was so new that none of the elm trees sprouting from the lawns were taller than eight feet. She lived alone with her dog, a perky Bichon named Mimi.

It was when she was outdoors walking Mimi, early one May evening, that she realized he was watching her.

She felt his attention on her before she actually saw him. He lived with his mother in a ranch-style home, halfway down the block from Olivia. As she walked by the house, she saw the gauzy curtains on a bay window stir, as if blown by a breeze. She fixed her eyes on the road ahead, following his movements with her peripheral vision. She detected a slight parting of the curtains, evidence of a spy within—but more acutely, she
felt
his gaze on her. It was a sensation like fingers pressing gently—and insistently—on the back of her neck.

Of course, Olivia was used to catching the eye of the opposite sex (and here in diverse Atlanta, the same sex, too). She was a honey-brown sister, five-five, with the lithe body of a dancer, the result of rigorous exercise. She had soft brown eyes, shoulder-length auburn hair, and a megawatt smile. Men tended to look at her quite frequently, and the tank top and shorts that she wore encouraged an admiring glance.

But this was different.

This was the surreptitious stare of a voyeur. The leer of a man who was undressing her with his eyes, visualizing her participating in a depraved sexual fantasy. This was creepy.

The man who lived at 1408 River view Drive was a convicted rapist. His name was Lonnie White.

As Olivia strolled past, Mimi trotting alongside her, anxiety rippled through her stomach.

“Keep walking,” she muttered under her breath. “Don’t let him know that I feel him watching me.”

But it was difficult. She had to fight the compulsion to run screaming back to her house, lock all of the doors, and never venture outside again. She gritted her teeth. She had to do this.

She kept walking until she reached the cul-de-sac at the end of the block. Then she turned around and began walking back. She prepared herself to pass his house again.

This time, she saw him. He’d opened the garage door. He emerged from the cavernlike darkness of the garage like a creature stepping out of its lair. He held a push broom in his large, meaty hands.

Brown-skinned, Lonnie stood around six feet two, with the hulking, flabby build of a football player gone to seed. He had dark eyes set in a clean-shaven face that looked as soft as a young boy’s. He wore a wooly Afro, and he was dressed in a T-shirt that read,
WHITE FAMILY REUNION
2002, and faded, paint-spotted Levi’s.

He looked harmless, really. Like the good-natured, neighborhood man-child who offered to cut your grass for ten dollars. Or the mild-mannered, former high school classmate whose name you could never remember. But Lonnie White was a monster—a modern-day predator. He had served six years in prison for rape, and was reputed to have been responsible for many, many more sexual crimes, but they hadn’t been able to pin additional charges on him. He’d been unemployed and living in his mother’s house for four months now. Olivia doubted that any of the neighbors knew who he really was.

But she knew better.

As Olivia neared, Lonnie set about sweeping the driveway, though it already looked clean to her. Mimi began to growl, which was atypical. Her dog was usually friendly to everyone.

Mimi knew better, too.

Lonnie stopped sweeping. “Now that’s a cute dog. Does she bite?”

He had a soft, mellifluous voice, with a gentle Georgia accent. Not the sinister voice of a vicious criminal. It was unnerving.

Olivia forced herself to smile. “No, she’d never bite. She’s completely harmless.”

Lonnie grinned. He had perfectly straight, white teeth—they belonged in the mouth of a better man. “What’s her name?”

“Mimi.”

By now, Mimi was barking.

“Feisty little thing, ain’t she?” Lonnie asked. He leaned against the broom.

Olivia tugged Mimi’s leash. “I’d better get her home.”

“You take care, miss. I’ll see you around.”

Lonnie watched her as she walked all the way back to her house. She could feel it. She had to bite her tongue to keep from screaming.

An hour later, Olivia was watching television with Mimi on her lap when the doorbell rang.

Mimi hopped off Olivia’s lap and raced to the door, barking.

“Go lie down,” Olivia said to the dog. Rebuked, Mimi slunk away, a growl rumbling deep in her throat.

Lonnie was at the door. He’d changed into a polo shirt and clean jeans.

She had expected him, but her heart picked up speed.

“Evening, miss.” He held a plastic grocery bag in his hands. “My mama asked me to give you this, since you was new to the neighborhood. A welcoming gift.”

It was a pecan pie from Kroger. The price tag was still on the plastic lid.

Olivia accepted the pie. “Thank you, this is a nice gesture.”

“My name’s Lonnie.” He stuck out his hand, which was large enough to palm a basketball.

Olivia hesitated. How many women had he pinned down with this hand as he violently thrust into them? How many horrified screams had that palm muffled? How much innocent blood had spilled through those fingers?

Striving to conceal her revulsion, she shook his hand. It was clammy, like shaking hands with a waterlogged corpse.

“I’m Olivia.”

He held on to her fingers a beat too long to be neighborly. She shoved her hand deep into her pocket, wishing she could wash it.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Olivia.”

She caught a whiff of cheap cologne. He’d splashed on far too much, had taken a bath in the stuff. It made her want to gag.

“Is the man of the house home, too?” he asked. “I’d like to say my greetings.”

Clever. Fishing for information.

“There’s no man of the house,” she said. “It’s just me and Mimi.”

“Ah, gotcha.” He chuckled, but she could see the machinery working in his brain. “You one of those independent women, huh? Live in a house by yourself and all?”

“I guess I am, Lonnie.” She added: “A good man is hard to find.”

“Keep your eyes peeled. Never know where you might meet him. He might just come knocking at your door one day.” He blushed slightly, and lowered his gaze, as if ashamed at his own brazenness.

“Wouldn’t that be something?” she asked.

Lonnie shifted from one foot to the other. He wanted to come inside, she sensed. But she wasn’t ready for that—yet.

“Thanks for the pie,” she said. “It was nice meeting you. Tell your mother I said hi.”

“I sure will.”

He stood on the doorstep, without moving.

Her heart boomed so loudly she wondered if he could hear it.

“Yes?” she asked.

He smiled hesitantly, like a shy teenager.

“Aw, nothing,” he said. “You have a good night.”

“You, too.”

She closed the door.

Lonnie remained on the doorstep for a half a minute before he turned and shuffled away.

Olivia sighed. Then she went to the kitchen and tossed the pecan pie in the wastebasket. And she thoroughly washed the hand that had shaken his.

That night, Olivia took a bath before retiring to bed. Submerged in the garden tub, she luxuriated in the scents of lavender and vanilla, sipped a glass of Chardonnay, and performed what had become a nightly ritual: writing in her diary. She balanced the journal on the lip of the tub.

May 7

Today, I finally spoke to Lonnie. He looks the same—like a harmless oaf. It’s no wonder that he’s fooled so many women.

Now that he’s met me, I don’t think it will be long before he will try something. It’s inevitable. He can’t control himself.

He never should have been released from prison. I’ll call everyone first thing in the morning.

The clock is ticking ...

Olivia stepped out of the tub and dried off with a thick, warm towel. Leaving the towel on the floor, she walked out of the bathroom and into the bedroom.

She enjoyed the feeling of cool air caressing her bare flesh, but she was not doing this for mere sensory pleasure.

Before bathing, she’d pulled back the thin curtains on the large bedroom windows. Not all of the way, but wide enough to give someone a tempting peek, a tantalizing glimpse.

Someone like Lonnie.

He would be watching her house. With binoculars. That was the way he stalked his prey. He’d admitted it during his trial.

She paraded past one of the windows, her breasts bouncing.

Watch me, baby.

She walked in front of another window, as if moving about the bedroom cleaning or looking for something.

Mimi lay on the bed, head cocked, watching her quizzically.

“You think he’s enjoying this?” Olivia asked the dog. Mimi wagged her tail.

Olivia approached a window, acted surprised to notice that the curtains were parted, and cinched them together—but not before giving anyone watching a full frontal view.

That’ll get his heart racing.

She strolled to the other window and pulled together the curtains on that one, too.

She’d left her nightgown on the bed, near the first window. She dressed, slowly, positioning her body to provide a luscious silhouette viewable from outside.

By now, he probably was masturbating.

She cut off the lights.

She sat on the bed and waited for a few minutes.

Then, she crept to the window and peered through the curtains.

A tall, husky black man with a cap pulled over his head ambled down the street, binoculars in his hand, like a kid walking home after his favorite movie.

She’d pegged him perfectly. The pervert.

“Show’s over, Lonnie,” she said. “Come back for the sequel, tomorrow night.”

But as it turned out, she would see Lonnie earlier than that.

The next day was a Saturday. Unlike most people, Olivia did not sleep in on the weekends. She rose at dawn and exercised in the fitness room she’d set up in the finished basement. She put herself through a punishing, two-hour workout. Aerobics, weight lifting, and knocking around the hundred-pound heavy bag.

Afterward, she showered and made several phone calls. It took an hour for her to call everyone that she needed. By the time she finished, it was nearly ten o’clock.

She changed into a cherry-red bathing suit. It was going to be in the low 80’s, a nice day for taking in some sun rays—though she was not really interested in a tan.

She lay on a lounge chair in the backyard, wearing sunglasses, sipping a tall glass of sweet tea, and listening to an India Arie CD. Girl-power songs about loving yourself and taking control of your life. She periodically checked her watch. It wouldn’t be long.

Barely an hour after she had begun sunbathing, Lonnie poked his head around the corner of the house.

He wore the same family reunion T-shirt and paint-soiled jeans he’d worn yesterday. He was getting comfortable with her. Or perhaps he was just filthy.

“Good morning, Miss Olivia.” He gave her a half-wave. “I rang the doorbell, then I heard the music playing and figured you was out back here.”

“Hi, Lonnie.” She put on a plastic smile. She shifted on the lounge chair, to best display her legs and cleavage to him. “You’re an early riser on the weekends, I see.”

Lonnie’s lips had parted. He stared at her body.
Gawked
really. His eyes had glazed over, and she was sure that he hadn’t heard a word that she’d said.

He had an erection, too. One of his hands slid into his pockets and slowly stroked its length.

Revulsion curdled her stomach. He was cruder than she had thought.

She cleared her throat. “Lonnie?”

He blinked. His eyes swam back into focus, and he snatched his hand out of his pocket, shamefaced, though his erection remained.

“Good morning, Miss Olivia,” he said, clearly not realizing that he was repeating himself.

BOOK: Twisted Tales

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